You’re already familiar with the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) if you’ve ever opened Computer Management, IIS Administration or any of the other Windows management tools. The most common version today is 2.0, found on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. Back in March 2006, Microsoft released MMC 3.0 without much fanfare. The big changes in 3.0 are a new programming model for .NET-based snap-ins and reliability improvements. MMC 3.0 can isolate snap-ins from each other, at least if they are .NET-based, and do a bit better job of error handling and logging in general.

If you have not already installed MMC 3.0, you’ll need it before too long. BizTalk Server 2006’s Enterprise Single Sign On Admin tool requires MMC 3.0, and there will be many more in the future.

There are freely available versions of MMC 3.0 for the various editions of Windows, but you need to get the right one for your OS. Search Microsoft Downloads for ‘MMC 3.0’ to find the one you need. You’ll need Windows XP SP2 or later, or Windows Server 2003 SP1 or later. If you’re running Vista, you can stop reading now, because you already have MMC 3.0 and it is pre-optimized!

Once you have MMC 3.0 installed, you may find that snap-ins that rely on it (and you generally won’t know which ones do) start up slowly. You may find yourself staring at the screen for a long time each and every time you start up one of those snap-ins. The reason is that a bunch of code in MMC 3.0 is written in .NET. No, that in itself does not make it slow! For some unknown reason, Microsoft does not optimize the MMC 3.0 .NET code upon installation as it does with the .NET Framework itself. (For you developers, the DLLs aren’t automatically GAC’d, nor are native images generated.)

There’s a very easy fix for this. Speed up your MMC 3.0 snap-in startup times by opening a Command Prompt and running ‘mmcperf.exe’. It’s in your Windows\System32 directory. This will create ready-to-run versions of the MMC .NET code (native images). You’ll notice a big difference in startup time — and we may never know why Microsoft didn’t just do this out of the box! Note that this does not speed up the snap-ins once they are actually running. This is related only to the startup time when you run MMC and load a .NET-based snap-in.